单一故事的危险

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.

我是一个讲故事的人。我想给大家讲几个关于"单一故事的危险"的亲身经历。我在尼日利亚东部的一个大学校园里长大。

My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.

我妈妈说我两岁就开始读书了，虽然我觉得四岁可能更接近事实。我读的都是英国和美国的儿童书籍。

All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.

我写的角色都是白皮肤、蓝眼睛的，他们在雪地里玩耍，吃苹果，讨论天气多么美好。

Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

尽管我住在尼日利亚，从没出过国。我们没有雪，只有芒果，也从不讨论天气。

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.

我写的角色喝姜汁啤酒。反正我根本不知道是什么。

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.

这说明了我们在面对故事时是多么容易受影响，多么脆弱。

Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them.

因为我读的书里角色都是外国人，我开始相信书里就应该是外国人。

Things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.

后来我发现非洲作家如Chinua Achebe，我的文学认知发生了转变。

I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

像我这样的人——皮肤是巧克力色的女孩——也可以出现在文学里。

I started to write about things I recognized. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature.

我开始写我能识别的事物。但我不知道像我这样的人可以出现在文学里。

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages.

我来自中产家庭，爸爸是教授，妈妈是行政人员。我们有住家帮佣。

So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.

我八岁时来了新男仆费米。我妈妈唯一说的是，他家非常穷。

My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing."

"吃完！费米家什么都没有。"

So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made.

我觉得费米家太可怜了。后来我们去他村子，他妈妈给我们看他哥哥编的精美篮子。

I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.

我很震惊。我从没想过他家里任何人能做出什么东西。

Their poverty was my single story of them. Their poverty was all I knew about them. And I think it was a very distorted story.

他们的贫穷就是我对他们的唯一故事。这是一个扭曲的故事。

Years later, I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me.

多年后我19岁去美国上大学，我的室友对我很震惊。

She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language.

她问我英语在哪里学的，我说尼日利亚把英语作为官方语言时她很困惑。

She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.

她问我能不能听"部落音乐"，我拿出Mariah Carey磁带时她很失望。

She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me.

她觉得我不会用炉子。她甚至在见到我之前就已经同情我了。

Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe.

她对非洲人的默认态度是居高临下的同情。她的单一故事是关于灾难的故事。

In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

在单一故事里，非洲人不可能像她，不可能有比同情更复杂的情感。

If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.

如果我不是在尼日利亚长大，我也会认为非洲是等待白人拯救的地方。

I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.

我会像看待费米一家那样看待非洲人。这个单一故事来源于西方文学。

A professor once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." He said my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man.

有教授说我小说不是"真正的非洲"，说我人物太像他。

The professor told me: "My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African."

教授说："我的人物开车、不挨饿。因此不是真正的非洲人。"

I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.

在单一故事这个问题上，我自己也有罪。几年前我去墨西哥。

And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border.

移民成了墨西哥人的同义词。墨西哥人是榨干医疗系统、偷渡边境的人。

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing.

我在瓜达拉哈拉看着人们工作、卷玉米饼、抽烟、欢笑。

I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant.

我先是惊讶，然后被羞耻淹没。他们在我脑海里变成了一个单一形象。

I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

我为自己感到羞耻。这就是如何创造单一故事：把一个民族描绘成一件事，反复描绘，他们就会变成那样。

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.

故事很重要。故事曾被用来剥夺、诽谤，但也可以用来赋权、人性化。

I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you.

当我们拒绝单一故事，我们就能重新找回一种天堂。谢谢大家。